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ART REVIEW; A Postwar Survey, Semi-Wild at Heart

THE Museum of Modern Art has got to be in an enough-already frame of mind. The staff has just come through a grueling strike. Construction of a new wing has reduced the sculpture garden to rubble. Now all hands are on deck for ''Open Ends,'' the third and final leg of ''MOMA 2000,'' the millennium-marking group show that has taken up every inch of the museum's gallery space for the last year.

One can easily make light of this curatorial marathon, which seems to go on forever. But the concept is sound: the show is meant to be a kind of head-clearing experiment in ways to shape the permanent collection for future display. By working out a series of thematic exhibitions, the museum gets to scramble the received A-B-C order of 20th-century art history and in the process discover some of the voices that it has undervalued or ignored.

The resulting mix-and-match approach is part of an international museum trend that has left some people fretting that linear history, the old history, ''the way things really happened,'' will be forgotten. But there's little danger of that. The art world is conservative. It always returns to the easy-to-sell straight and narrow. So any conceptual shake-up is valuable, and I say, go wild.

''Open Ends'' goes only semi-wild, or maybe sporadically wild, in its debut on the museum's second floor. (The third and fourth floors will be phased in later this fall.) The show covers the years from about 1960 to the present, which have been over all a dynamite, don't-stop-running time for art. Yet in presentation the period looks surprisingly well behaved.

This may reflect the museum's preference for polish and -- how to put it? -- ''frameability'' in art: even Damien Hirst and Paul McCarthy, artists graced with some kind of genius for making a mess, look tidy here. And possibly because so many of the newest pieces in this show have been in the collection only a short time -- a Matthew Barney is dated 2000 -- the museum is handling them with a certain caution, as if trying to figure out how to finesse their ''postmodern'' reputations.

In any event, ''Open Ends,'' which has been organized by a core team of Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of painting and sculpture; Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design; and Joshua Siegel, assistant curator of film and video, starts off on familiar footing with two classic modernist works that serve as thematic keys to much of what follows.

One is Barnett Newman's beetling anti-monumental sculpture ''Broken Obelisk'' (1963-69), its sharp, upside-down point pinning idealism like a butterfly to the ground. The other is James Rosenquist's mural-like ''F-111'' (1964-65), a Pop version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling that turns images of war, childhood and American consumerism into billboard advertising for the apocalypse. Both works are installed in the second-floor lobby, and from there ''Open Ends'' branches off into five thematic shows. Probably the logical one to hit first is ''Pop and After,'' organized by Mr. Varnedoe, a surveyish look, useful but dry, at how one strand of postwar art has endured and changed over four decades.

In the 1980's and 90's pieces, the Pop approach becomes distanced and critical. Warhol's soup is replaced by controlled substances in the print series ''The Last Supper'' by Mr. Hirst. Mr. Oldenburg's ice cream turns excremental in a painting by Mike Kelley. (Images of excrement recur in ''Open Ends,'' giving the show's title an interesting twist.) As for Mr. Wesselmann's icon of passive female sexuality, Cindy Sherman consigns it to the deep, dark past with her hilarious faux-seductress self-portraits.

A selection of Pop-ish political art yields similar contrasts. A Jasper Johns American flag painting from the 1950's is as mute and guarded as the cold war era that produced it, while David Hammons's 1990 ''African-American Flag,'' done in Marcus Garvey's black nationalist colors, is a real banner, hanging loose and ready for use.

Good as it is to see such pieces together, they suggest what can get lost in era-spanning shows: namely, period texture, the you-are-there verve generated by a combination of exemplary works, inspired misfires and ephemeral quick-reaction pieces. Maybe that kind of energy will come through in an installation of political art planned for upstairs.

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''Pop and After'' is followed by an attractive selection of prints organized by Judith B. Hecker, curatorial assistant in the department of prints and illustrated books, that brings Minimalism into the picture. But things start hopping with ''Architecture Hot and Cold,'' a hallucinatory gathering of images of unbuilt or unbuildable buildings, which collectively push the idea of utopianism in directions Barnett Newman could barely imagine.

The installation, assembled by Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design, is engagingly dense and busy. It's as if we were looking over Mr. Riley's shoulder as he flipped through his files, reluctant to let anything hit the reject pile. (''That? We have to keep that.'') The result turns what is usually assumed to be a professionals-only field into fun for everyone.

The same is true of the show titled ''Matter,'' which joins items from the museum's design collection with contemporary art. Such an alliance is basically business as usual these days. But the shrewd choices made by the curators -- Ms. Antonelli, Laura Hoptman and Kristin Helmick-Brunet -- take the question of cross-disciplinary sharing beyond the material level and into social and psychological realms, where a chair says practically all there is to say about the mortal fate and spiritual potential of its occupants.

''Open Ends'' is punctuated here and there by solo installations. The best of these is the much admired two-screen video ''Ever Is Over All'' (1997) by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. On one screen the camera zooms through windblown flowers like a pollen-drunk bee. On the other a young woman in a party frock and ruby red shoes skips down a Zurich street, smashing car windows with a flower-shaped club. It's an exhilarating piece, a fairy tale of destruction that makes a perfect transition to the final show, ''Innocence and Experience.''

Organized by Mr. Varnedoe and Mr. Siegel, this section tackles one of the defining motifs of current art -- the corruption of childhood -- and evokes it through a handful of familiar sculptures from the 1980's and 90's: Jeff Koons's stainless steel bunny, Mona Hatoum's glass crib, Robert Gober's wax image of a little girl's shoe sprouting human hair -- arranged in a chapel-like space.

The theme is intensely rich -- dark, inflammatory, poetic, as a visit to the great Peter Hujar exhibition now at Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea instantly reveals -- but even here, the Modern keeps its cool. Although the walls are lined with provocative photographs, the erotic pictures of children by Robert Mapplethorpe and Sally Mann that made legal and ethical waves in recent years are not among them.

One can also point to other, broader, more urgent exclusions in ''Open Ends.'' The number of women remains low. African-American and Latino artists are few, as are Asians outside of architecture and design. Contemporary African work? Virtually none. And so-called outsider art is nowhere in the picture.

So all of this goes on the must-do list for the Museum of Modern Art's future. The compiling of such a list was, presumably, one of the inspirations for ''MOMA 2000.'' And if some enlightened exhibiting and shopping results, this exhausting project will have been worth the effort.

The first part of ''Open Ends,'' the third and final cycle of ''MOMA 2000,'' remains at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, through Jan. 2. The third-floor galleries will be open from Nov. 5 through Jan. 30, the fourth-floor galleries from Oct. 19 through Jan. 30.